All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.

Email has a lot of warts besides its obvious graces, especially when you look at the back-end of how emails are actually stored and transferred and authenticated. So I think we as programmers are naturally drawn to the idea of developing the email-killer. The central problem with the dreamers seems to be that they're not dreaming deeply enough.<p>Email is a communications multitool which leverages the whole human subconscious to effect its various uses: a human is supposed to know whether this is a "your boss demands that you do this" email or a "your friend wants you to look at her cute cat" email or "your uncle is ranting about fluoride in the water again" email. Most email killers do not and cannot eliminate this mental overhead. Graham only says "other people should be able to add to my todo list" -- he's not killing email, he's considering an email-aware todo list. That's very common. Skype is not an email killer precisely because it doesn't dream big enough: it is a realtime messaging protocol which hit it big because it worked with video. Trello is not an email killer precisely because it's for organizing groups. RSS is not an email killer because it only solves the limited problem of keeping aware of new content.<p>Email does all of these tasks -- poorly, but it does them. If you want to really kill email, you need to offer the core functionality effortlessly. Email II would understand "circles" of friends automatically, so that there is only an "inbox" for those people who are contacting you for the very first time. Like syndication, Email II would host the content on the publisher's web server to be downloaded whenever the client wants -- this has spam-deterrent effects, since the network doesn't take responsibility for the content. It would hopefully allow us to unify mailing lists. We can protect privacy with automatic cryptography; "chris::example.com" can stand for a public key which is stored on the example.com machines. The email killer needs to be good at segmenting messages so that we can say "This is the text of my invitation to a wedding, but it also comes with a standard-appointment-form where I describe where and when it is, so that it can be rapidly added to your 'upcoming dates' in the relevant social circle." (Since this must merge with dates and todo-lists, presumably example.com contains its own list of stuff which chris::example.com has stored for his own use.)<p>And I want to at this point admit defeat: because I think even <i>those</i> ideas are <i>not daring enough</i>. The email killer is probably going to have to do even more than all of that, and my own imagination becomes limited.

&#62; Why build a new messaging product when the basic functionality of email combined <i>with a little effort from the user</i> can achieve the same result?<p>Well, to begin with, users don't want to expend even a little bit of effort. Isn't that why everyone is trying to minimize friction in the sign-up process?<p>I agree that e-mail, as a protocol, is a powerful tool that is often misunderstood. But we really need <i>e-mail clients</i> that allow us to keep track of a large number of threads without getting lost of feeling swamped. Gmail tries to do this to some extent, but it's far from perfect.

I've wondered a lot about why e-mail isn't used more as a backend for different services. But as far as I can tell, messaging products proliferate because their creators want to create profitable products rather than distributed protocols.<p>E-mail is a pretty good group of protocols for distributing arbitrary messages between different locations on the Internet. It's easy to imagine how all sorts of messaging and social network products could be implemented as a specialized e-mail client with a good user experience. Their forms might be slightly different than they have now, but they'd serve approximately the same consumer purpose.<p>For example, you could build a social networking "client" with e-mail as a backend. Status updates, photos, etc. would be distributed to all your contacts via email, and the client would produce a "timeline" based on the data in its mailbox, without ever showing the user the original messages.<p>But you give up a lot of control that way, and it's harder to monetize. What developers want (and users too, to be honest) is a centralized service that they can control, mine data with, and sell products or show ads. A distributed protocol, while in some ways more powerful (and less dependent on a fallible central authority!), doesn't achieve the real business aims.

+1<p>E-mail is incredibly underutilized as a technology.<p>One could make an argument the majority of instagram's (of course not the filters) functionality could be handled by e-mail, but the "perceived need" to use apps on the smartphone that you purchased for a large percentage of your monthly income but the experience of using the app is difficult to discount.<p>Another point worth considering is that much of the functionality associated with Path is available in Facebook if you want to play around with settings, but for some reason Path still seems relevant.

I've thought about writing this post so many times.<p>E-mail is not broken, but we'll continually try to convince ourselves that our inabilities to be collaborative and communicate properly is because we're not given the right medium to do so. This is bullshit. People who are terrible at communication will continue to be terrible at communication regardless of what tool they use.<p>The hammer isn't broken, the carpenter is. Fix the carpenter.<p>EDIT: I should add - I see many tools that try to replace e-mail aren't largely trying to fix the problems with communication, but rather they are trying to assign accountability. This is great for bosses (or "controllers"), but not necessarily great for everyone. I've simplified this too much and could go into way more detail if I had the time.

Email is awesome, certainly. But if everyone actually started a mass-email to all their friends about every little topic they post to a Facebook status update, I'd call 'em pretty damned rude abusing my email inbox like that and my email client would need even better filters than it already has to fight the commercial spam.<p>Experiments to find things better than email will mostly fail, but I think we still need more experiments. There must be something better than all that spam for a start.

In social networks, companies are not trying to fix email or group communication because its broken. They are trying to produce users for their specific applications. If they use Email as a substrate for communication, they have no user. They end up being just a software vendor.

It helps to remember that the first social networks (See: Usenet) were built out of email.<p>EDIT: All email needs is the ability to display information like the web can. Properly formatted and threaded.

I know all the people pushing for social networks will disagree, but I think email can be fixed, just like static web pages have been fixed to do asynchronous JavaScript to provide dynamic web experiences.<p>I think the problem is the cure is much worse than the disease. The cures of using social network tools is often an enclosed, controlled network such as Twitter or Facebook, which puts control of the network in the hands of few.<p>Instead of trying to replace email, I think we should "fix" it rather than trying to replace it. Some advocate using Web/REST/HTTP to replace email; I think email isn't that doomed.<p>Remember, the popularity of email is because anybody can start an email service. Nobody can just use Facebook or Twitter; you have to have the approval of an inner circle authority. Imagine if every Web site required MPAA or RIAA control, and they prevented even non-infringing material online using SOPA!

I couldn't agree more. I deal with a large number of older people on a daily basis as part of my volunteer work. Getting these folk to use the Internet in any way is painful. For example, I send out these PDF reports once a week. It's the same template every time but for accounting purposes, it has to be done. I wrote a Python script to generate those for me and I stick them up on a simple website on S3. The script them emails everyone to let them know the report is available and that they can download it. It includes a link to the report and to the website with all the other reports. These guys absolutely cannot open a browser and view the PDF in the browser. If it's not an attachment to the email, they don't know what to do.<p>TLDR --- Email is great. It's so simple that even non-techies get it.

<i>All I was doing was avoiding doing the work, the real effort of producing the content that actually mattered. I was hiding from honest sharing with the conviction that the tools were not good enough yet.</i><p>This is a great insight. Building the platform is sometimes only half the battle -- getting users to produce the content that makes the product interesting , valuable (and eventually profitable) seems like the challenge these days. Because the further entrenched people become to the platform that houses their "content", the more loyal they become. Facebook is the most obvious example, and a lot of Facebook communications read like watered-down email OK for public consumption.

Mail is broken in many ways. Because there is no authentication and thus forged from addresses, error messages can't be returned. Relays are allowed to modify mails which invalidates hashes and signatures. Attached and included documents are encoded in base64. ...<p>The main usage problem is abuse of this communication channel. While our email addresses should be public so that anyone in the world may contact us, we are forced to use hidden emails to protect ourselves. This Is the reason of the success of messaging system limited to friends. There is much less abuse.<p>The problem was known with fax, and will happen with phones if the phone call price drops to zero.

This reminds me of something most new communication media seem <i>not</i> to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it <i>bridge</i> to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto.<p>I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently.<p>Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.

E-mail has a culture around it that doesn't work for many tasks. It's called "inbox zero". Basically for most e-mail users they attempt to clear out their inbox to zero new messages every time they go to e-mail. This means if you want to do things that require thought over a period of time you'll almost always have someone using e-mail the wrong way for the task.

I am curious about anyone currently trying to build a communication tool, and their argument for why it is a better solution than email.

The problem is that email is so broken, you could sort of fix it, but people have been trying for years and it's easier to start again. For example we still have these problems:<p>- No proof that people are who they say they are, we have PGP/GPG but no one uses it.<p>- Related to the above, I can't control who can send me email, people use different email addresses and any address can be faked anyway.<p>- No accepted way to post short messages, people still post long email with big disclaimers and/or adverts at the bottom<p>- Poor email client support for sending/receiving large numbers of pictures, with thumbnails and full versions<p>- Lack of any real semantic support tags, share a single link, geo information etc.<p>- No way to public display of your timeline (i.e. twitter)<p>- No obvious way to have all contact's photos against emails [seems to be coming in now somehow, not sure how really]<p>- Inability to remove content you accidentally sent<p>- User expectations that email works in a certain way and doesn't need to change.

This is a timely article for me as I am just about to launch a email startup called Sendicate that adds tools to simplify and empower email-based communication. Another way of looking at it is like a content publishing app for email. For those interested here are some more thoughts on what I am building <a href="http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate" rel="nofollow">http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate</a><p>Email certainly has some issues but it is also infinitely flexible and powerful and drives a lot of our day to day interaction with the internet. I am surprised that there is such a drive to re-invent email when a few specialized tools that add value to email will solve many use cases without re-inventing the wheel.

Email is OK as a communication tool. But companies use it as a task/to-do list and to work together on tasks.<p>Email is terrible to achieve this. You will end up with lots of emails and multiple versions of the same documents...<p>That is why I wish someone fix email! :)

I agree with a lot of the points here, Email in itself isn't broken. I've spent the last 2 months studying users email habits, who sends what?, what do they receive?, what are the conversations like?, how is the platform being used? etc.. the conclusion is simple email is incredibly personal each single users works in their own way.<p>The problem is where these habits collide, the way I receive an email from you doesn't match how I'd construct and send an email, therefore whatever I receive is going to cause me a problem.

I met a nice girl who went back to her home country and we exchanged email addresses. But the emails we sent each other ended up in the spam folder. This is unacceptable. Email is unreliable. As much as I hate Facebook, it actually works for these situations. Email is ok as a secondary communications tool, but I would never build anything that relies on it.

I think the broken part of email exists in business communication, in my experience it's grossly overused. It becomes an endless todo list that requires processing (eg, response, forward, assign, done, etc). This is inefficient and distracts us from our primary functions.

Email, as well as IRC. Because email doesn't handle real-time spontaneous casual online conversations.<p>Twitter is a poor way of doing it, and Facebook is just email + shallow egotistical dopamine hacks.

yeah yeah,email is the original great killer app of the internet. But as far as collaboration, it is full of problems and for the average user just causes problems and confusion and makes people bend over backwards to try and keep up. All the new developments are about taking it to a new level...beyond the original idea. Meaning less silos, easier many-to-many and one-to-many etc...

I don't agree, even if Gmail brought a lot to emails (threads and antispam) it's still a problem that, in my opinion, facebook message tackles.

I guess the author forgot to add "... and oh yeah, blogs too" to the title.

I can't help thinking about Google Wave :)

Email is not great. My biggest problem with email is that it's unreliable. There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination. I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans (I'm looking at you, mac.com and gmail.com). This is I'm sure because some server down the chain messed up somewhere.<p>How can you track this down? There is no way to even know if your email made it to a person's inbox (like a kind of forced "received receipt" -- I don't care if they read it yet).

NO. I want to scream. NO. I just began working at a company that uses "distribution groups" (mailing lists) as a "social network". It's awful as it's not threaded, it's not archived, it's not searchable. It's terrible.